As Internet usage grows, web privacy has become an increasingly important issue and a growing number of methods of web tracking pose a threat to this privacy. Spyware, viruses and malware have long been considered privacy threats, but they are far from the only methods of web tracking. One very common form of web tracking utilizes hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) cookies to follow a user's activities across multiple domains and report that information to a server. Advertisers can use information from tracking cookies to profile users and target them specifically, as can social engineers and other malicious actors.
Standards such as Do Not Track attempt to address this problem by allowing users to opt out of tracking, but it may be difficult to tell if a website is honoring this convention. Traditional methods for detecting the presence of web tracking may require several round-trips between a client and a server and therefore may be slow and resource-intensive. These traditional methods also may suffer from high rates of false positives or false negatives. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for detecting the presence of web tracking.